It takes an army of ecommerce tools to run and grow your business these days. And if you're already a small business owner, you know how much time and money it takes just to keep up with the latest and greatest.

To top it off, once you start using various apps, you can suddenly pile up thousands of data points that easily become siloed. Thankfully, you can unlock remarkable value once you sync these apps together. You just need the right tool to rely on.

That’s what we do at Alloy, and some of the best experts in the game share the same vision. Here’s what Eli Weiss, Director of CX and Retention at Jones Road Beauty has to say about Alloy:

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“Alloy was ​​the bridge that we were looking for—like how do we pull Octane AI data, Gorgias data, and Shopify data and pull it all into Klaviyo to create this wildly comprehensive plan. That's the mission.”

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To give you some tangible insights into how our customers are leveraging Alloy, here’s a list of some of the 10 most popular automated workflows: 

10 automated workflows to improve your customer experience

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1. Add a gift to subscription customers who are at risk of churn

There’s nothing better than a little surprise and delight for customers, especially ones who are at risk of churning. In fact, a surprise gift can potentially save you from losing those customers.

Here’s why surprise gifts work: in a survey by Harris Interactive, 90% of customers said a free gift with a purchase helped increase their loyalty to the brand. 

That being said, your marketing team probably doesn’t have time on a weekly basis to comb through all of your at-risk subscription customers, pull their data, and manually add them to a list to get a free gift with their next order. 

Here’s how to automate this: At what moment are customers considered at risk of churn from your subscription program? Is it when they skip one month? Two months? Whatever the timeframe, with Alloy, you can trigger a workflow to scan for customers who are at medium or high risk. These customers will automatically get a free gift added to their next order because the workflow will notify your fulfillment team. This will work with whatever shipping tool you’re using—whether that’s Shipbob, Shipstation, Shippo, or any of the other logistics tools in Alloy’s integrations list. 

Also, since the risk qualification is calculated by the number of skipped orders, when customers meet that number you can move them into an automated email marketing campaign to offer incentives or ask them about their experience.

Once set up, this entire process becomes a hands-off experience that you can simply let run on a weekly basis.

2. Segment customers into mailing lists by Shopify tags

It’s incredibly important to keep a clean email list, and to do so you have to properly organize your customers into segments. Not only does this help you send relevant content to each type of customer with a better chance of converting them, but it will also improve your open rates and click-through rates. 

However, it’s a tedious process to segment customers. That’s why many brands on Alloy use a workflow to automatically add certain Shopify customers to specific Klaviyo lists. By creating a workflow that runs through all your new customers on a weekly basis, Alloy will scan for specific tags and put those customers into the right mailing list. 

Here’s what this workflow looks like with Klaviyo: 

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3. Add upsells to your transactional emails based on customer tags

Hot take: Upselling products is a waste of time unless you’re going to put the effort into choosing ones each customer will actually like.

Okay maybe this isn’t a hot take, but it is true. If a customer purchased a cleanser to help with oily skin, then upselling them a moisturizer for dry skin isn’t the best move—or one that the customer will care about.

If you want to recapture customers and give them another reason to purchase, use customer tags to upsell items that match the customer’s needs and add those upsells to your transactional emails.

Using Alloy, you can pull in data about the customer’s recent purchase, zero-party data from quizzes, or past purchases. Then, use that information to add specific products to your upsell emails that are based on a customer’s real interests and concerns. This increases the chances of customers purchasing your upsell offer.

Here’s what this looks like with Omnisend, for example: 

While this example is using Omnisend, you can create this same workflow with any ESP of choice, including Klaviyo and Mailchimp. If you’re interested in trying this, use this Alloy recipe here to get this workflow set up in seconds.

4. Streamline vendor order management

Some brands work with multiple vendors to create and ship products. In those situations, it can take a lot of time to reach out to each vendor every time a new order is placed and manually update a Google sheet with all the correct order information.

I mean, maybe it’s okay if you get five orders a week, but what if you’re getting hundreds? That manual process can take up a lot of time.

What if you had a tool that could automatically break out each individual order by line item, add it to a Google sheet associated with the right vendor, and send a notification to the vendor to add their information?

Hint… Alloy can do this. 

Essentially, Alloy becomes the vendor order management system.

Using product tags, you can add information to individual products about which vendor it comes from. By adding an “Iterate” logic block, Alloy will review each line item in customer orders to look for those tags.

Here’s an example: let’s say a customer purchases three items. Two of the items come from vendor A and the last item comes from vendor B. After Alloy circles through each item to pull the product tag, it sends an email to each vendor.

For the first two items from vendor A, Alloy sends an email notification to ask that vendor to update the tracking information and quantity available. The same thing happens for vendor B, but they get their own email with their specific product information.

Using this workflow, merchants have a Google sheet with each 3pl that automatically gets updated with the right information—and the vendors get an automatic prompt in real-time.

5. Add physical pamphlets to orders 

What if you could send customers educational material in every order based on data you collect about them in a quiz? 

L’amarue is doing this with Alloy by connecting Octane AI, Shopify, and Shipbob.

How does it work? In L’amarue’s Octane AI quiz, they ask customers detailed questions about their age, skin concerns, goals, target areas, and more. All of these questions give them valuable information about their customers and how L’amarue’s products can help them. 

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Since each skin concern requires a specific product (and education on how to use that product), Ande came up with the idea of giving customers a physical pamphlet in their orders based on the skin concerns they share in the quiz. 

For example, if a customer is looking to treat their eczema, L’amarue will send educational collateral with a customer’s order that shares helpful tips, along with additional information about eczema in general.

But adding a physical pamphlet to every order—especially one that’s customized to a customer’s skin concerns—isn’t easy to do without help from an automation tool. Here’s what L’amarue set up with Alloy: 

When a customer completes L’amarue’s quiz, their profile gets tagged in Shopify. Then it gets synced with Shipbob, where each piece of collateral is picked for orders. Adding these educational pieces to each order shows customers that L’amarue deeply cares about their skincare needs. 

6. Ask a customer for a review after an order is fulfilled

At some point, we’ve all experienced a brand asking us to leave a review on a product we haven’t even received in the mail yet. Whenever it happens, my immediate thought is "did my order get lost, or did someone steal it from my front porch?"

By not sending these requests at the right time, not only are you losing out on actually getting a review, but you’re causing the customer to feel anxiety about where their order is. Also, it makes your emails feel inhuman because it’s obvious to the customer that they’re being pushed into a generic email flow.

Thankfully, you can create a workflow that automatically triggers a follow-up email asking for a review when the order is tagged as fulfilled in Shopify. Here’s an example of how brands are doing this with Alloy and Omnisend:

7. Automatically ask customers to fix their address

Mistakes happen, and customers accidentally add an extra “0” to their home address or misspell their street name.

Unfortunately, though, this means their orders can’t arrive until the address is fixed.

Noticing this was an issue, Inked Gaming decided to build a workflow to automate the process of reaching out to customers to fix their incorrect addresses.

How does it work?

When an order with an incorrect address is flagged by the Inked Gaming team, Alloy puts the order on hold in Shipstation, emails the customer to request a new address, and then fulfills the order once it’s been updated. According to Inked Gaming, this workflow saves the team roughly two hours every week from order delays and shipping bottlenecks.

8. Send reorder Slack when inventory is low

Every ecommerce founder, marketer, and operator knows how much of a headache the logistics side of your business can be. With delays and hiccups happening more often than ever before, it’s essential to have a reliable tech stack for both you and your customers’ sake.

And that means making sure you always have inventory readily available. 

Fulfillment is truly a science and an art. Order too much and you have to run discounts to get rid of stock. Order too little and you have customers impatiently waiting for your products to arrive. This is why a popular workflow at Alloy is to get a slack notification everytime your inventory is low, so you know it’s time to reorder certain items. 

Here’s an example of how this workflow looks with a tool like ShipHero, but again, you can connect any app to this kind of recipe. 

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9. Automatically sync customer data from your on-site quizzes to your ESP

Quizzes are a great way to learn about customers: from their skincare concerns, favorite flavors, to their shoe sizes, you can find out everything you need to build a personalized experience at every customer touchpoint.

But it’s not super easy to take your data and sync it across all of your apps… unless there’s a direct integration between one tool to the next, and we all know that’s not always the case.

Instead, an integration tool saves you from having to manually export all of your customer data and upload it to each communication tool you use.

Here’s one example: in a one-step workflow, brands are taking their Octane AI data and creating a contact in their email platform. These contacts come with all of the custom property tags based on how they answered the questions in your quiz, so you can start creating customer segments and robust email journeys.

We have a workflow example with Omnisend that you can check it out here. But like every other example, you can build this exact same recipe with any email service provider of choice.

10. Send birthday campaigns based on loyalty data

When customers sign up for your loyalty program or make an account at your store, usually they share birthday information. With that information already in your hands, sending a personalized birthday campaign feels like low-hanging fruit.

But what if you took this experience one step further? Rather than sending the standard “happy birthday!” email, what if every customer gets a horoscope-related birthday campaign on their special day?

Happy Birthday, Anna! As a Pisces, we know how powerful your emotions can be. Here are a few products we recommend to get you through your happiest and saddest days.

(No hate to Pisces people—I am one myself.)

No matter what tool this data is stored in, using Alloy, you can connect this data to your email software and set up specific and customized birthday campaigns.

Also, since you’re already connecting data from your loyalty tool into Alloy and your ESP, you can also set up triggers to remind customers about their loyalty points balance and recommend some products to use them on.

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Have no idea where to begin? Get more done in less time with Alloy’s marketplace, which features hundreds of app integrations and ready-to-use recipe cards that may be customized to suit your business's needs. Or chat with our team here to find out how Alloy can help you.

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This article was written by Tina Donati, Content Marketing Lead at Alloy. Alloy is an ecommerce integration tool that allows brands to connect their entire tech stack and create automated workflows to improve the customer experience. Alloy also offers a B2B solution, called Alloy Embedded, which is a white-labeled integration solution that enables software companies to fast track their integration roadmap and provide native integration experiences. You can try Alloy for free, or browse through the marketplace of workflow templates to find a use case that suits your brand here.

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